Hobby Showcase: Pink Horrors

First things first, I'd like to announce the final two winners of the Lab's December Fan Appreciation Month:  War Tales and Marshmallow Scallops (aka Stew Reed)!  War Tales runs the blog A Bunch of Tactical Whatevers as is doing a pretty bang up job over there, I highly recommend checking out his site.  Stew is a local hobbyist and has been wargaming for some years now.  He has a sizeable Salamanders marine army and is currently working on a fledgling Tyranids army.  Both War Tales and Stew will be receiving a free Midwest Monster Lab t-shirt for their prize, congratulations to both!

Now, on to the models.  I have been working diligently on an all Tzeentch demons army and am proud to finally post pictures of the first complete models.  You may remember having seen some of these guys make appearances in earlier posts in varying degrees of completion as they've been a featured in terrain building and painting tutorials alike.

The Changeling was a must take for my army, the ability to disrupt enemy shooting aside, his model was simply too cool to pass up.  Though I stayed true to the core aspects of the codex paint scheme, I wanted to utilize a few key aesthetic aspects that would really make him pop.  The fade from bright blue at the top of the model to dark blue at the bottom, makes the dark depths of his cowl a focal point, drawing the eye and making his identity more ominous.  Another touch was the transition flames in his left hands.  I chose to paint the flames moving from a lime green to light blue to show off the Changeling's magical prowess and add an aura of otherworldliness to the model.  The lighting effects emanating from the flames were my first attempt at that technique and was a really fun learning experience.

All the models for my demon army will fit into the display board that I detailed in October and November's posts, and as such, have bases that fit into where they will be placed on the display.  The squad featured in this post all are standing on the trail of warp energy that is flowing from the temporal rift.  I decided that I wanted to make the warp energy really chaotic.  To represent this I green stuffed tentacles, waves, and undulations into each of the bases along with bitz from various chaos kits (chaos spawn, demon prince, and chaos lord kits).  Another feature of the warp energy are screaming souls, shifting color patterns, and swirling eddies.  It's a tall order to represent something as esoteric as warp energy, but a rewarding prospect all the same.

One of the coolest aspects of the army's cohort of pink horrors is that there are horrors at the varying life stages of that demonic species.  A "newborn" pink horror is actually known as a blue horror, and is, well, blue!

As a blue horror matures, it's skin color gradually begins to take on a shade approaching its final hue.  Here a horror is no longer the newborn shade of blue, but transitioning to the rich purple of "childhood."

As a horror reaches adolescence his color begins to more closely resemble a fully matured member of his species.  The skin color of an adolescent is darker than pure pink, more of a magenta.

This horror is getting quite near to full maturity.  As you can see on one side of his body it is still the adolescent magenta, while the other is pink.  If he's lucky he'll grow to look like..

THIS!  Here is a fully matured pink horror who has rightly deserved the name.  A hallmark of his maturity is not only his pale pink skin, but the prominent protrusion of two horns.  This is the epitome of what every horror wants to be, but all good things must come to an end, and the cycle begins again.

For whatever reason:  death, reproduction or otherwise, a pink horror will produce more blue horrors by sloughing off their old skin.  Previous Games Workshop fiction and game play represented the death of one pink horror with the production of two less substantial blue horrors (though those rules have been done away with, the fiction still remains in the Demon's codex and rule book). 

I still have plenty of horrors to paint, along with:  flamers, soul grinders, and even Kairos Fateweaver himself, so stay tuned for more demons!